I recently gave the i-GotU GPS Dataloggers what I would call a pretty scathing review.

I’ll let you read the entire review yourself for all the pros (there are a couple) and cons (there are lots) about the device, but the short story is that while the device works reasonably well, in my opinion the software that it ships with and the device itself are flaky and need massive useability improvements. Note that my review specifically covered the GT-200 unit, but the GT-120 has essentially the same feature set and therefore the same pros and cons.

I would not recommend this device for any serious photographer looking to geotag images with the GPS coordinates at which the image was created. There may be people for whom this gadget would be great (for an interesting (and far less negative) review please see the recent article over at imaging-resource.com), but I am simply not one of them.

Now to the update… I recently took this device with my on a week long trip from Calgary, Alberta, through Glacier National Park in Montana, down to Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, back up to Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park in southern Alberta, and then back home to Calgary. For almost the entire week the device tracked my route and location perfectly. I charged it every couple of days and I have great data from Glacier and Writing-on-Stone, and for most of the 4 days in Yellowstone. But. Not. All. Of. Yellowstone.

Mysteriously, the unit simply stopped recording for an entire day in the middle of the trip. It didn’t shut off. The battery wan’t dead. It continued to blink at regular intervals to show that it was alive and well. It even blinked appropriately when I hit its button (yes, it has only one) to mark specific waypoints. But it didn’t record any of it.

I made over a thousand images that day as we travelled extensively through the park, including several hours of walking at Upper Geyser Basin (home of Old Faithful). I’m not amused.

I was already considering getting rid of my GT-200, but this trip was the final straw that clinched it. Anybody want to buy it?? Who can suggest a better one for me??

I get asked for recommendations for photography books all the time.  I’ve read over 40 books on various aspects of photography in the last couple of years and I almost always have a good book to suggest (of course lately those books have typically been authored by Kelby or McNally).  A friend recently asked for a recommendation for a book about wildlife photography that he could pass on to someone planning a 5 week trip to Africa.

This is a topic with which I am extremely familiar as I shoot birds and wildlife it all the time.  But I quickly realized that this is one particular photography subject on which I had seen very few books, and for the most part those books that I have read have been entirely unremarkable.  Most of what I know on about making images of wildlife has either been self taught or been learned by applying lessons from other photographic topics to my wildlife photography.  Let’s face it, photography is photography and the basic rules of composition and exposure don’t change if you’re shooting a bride at a wedding or a bear in Alaska.  There may be other obvious similarities as well!

Yet I still wanted to be able to provide some ideas about some books to start with, so I went to Google and Amazon for some ideas.

I quickly found that the vast majority of “Wildlife Photography” books are about pictures of wildlife rather than about photography (a subtle but important distinction).  It immediately become clear to me that the search would have to be expanded to birds, nature, and/or travel photography (and in fact maybe travel photography would be a better subject for someone planning a 5 week long trip anyway…).  Using this expanded criteria I came up with three books to recommend, but they are older books and they may be tough to find new copies of.  Your local library may be your best bet if you want these books:

(NOTE – there may be some newer, better, and badder books available on the subject but I make a point of recommending only books that I have actually read…)

1. Moose Peterson’s Guide to Wildlife Photography: Conventional and Digital Techniques – Although it’s getting a little long in the tooth (it was published in 2003) the basic techniques presented haven’t changed in many years and this book is still very useful.  Unfortunately this book is very Nikon centric and some people find it difficult to get past that if they shoot a different brand of camera.  I can generally apply the same principles to any camera so it doesn’t really bother me.  Moose Peterson is widely considered to be the Dean of wildlife photography and his blog may be even more useful than this book.
2. The Art of Bird Photography: The Complete Guide to Professional Field Techniques – Also published in 2003, and also somewhat dated, this book by Arthur Morris is the go-to book for anyone that wants to get into bird photography.  Again the principles can easily be applied to any other photographic subject and much of the information is timeless.  Artie (as he likes to be called) is widely considered to be the Dean of bird photography and he has a lot of information to share.  Although this book went out of print years ago, Morris recently aquired the publishing rights and reprinted it himself. It is now available from his online store at his Birds as Art website.  While you’re there consider checking out his blog and his email newsletter.  They both contain lots of extremely valuable information.
3. John Shaw’s Nature Photography Field Guide - Another oldie (from 2001), but it’s still a goodie.  This book has far less to do with wildlife photography and is much more about nature and landscape, but there is still good stuff.  And if you’re on a trip it’s not going to be all about animals anyway.  The major weakness here is the almost complete lack of information from the digital age.  It’s an easy read though and it has some really great stuff inside…

I’ve got a bonus pick for you that’s more about vision and creativity in photography than it is about any specific genre of photography, and it is definitely not a technical “how-to” kind of book.  It gets lumped into the Travel Photography category because that’s the author’s specialty, but it could easily be included in many other categories as well.

“Within the Frame: The Journey of Photographic Vision” by David duChemin

 I couldn’t include it in my original list because I haven’t finished reading it yet.  In fact I’ve only read the first couple of chapters, but it is shaping up to be an excellent read AND it’s getting more rave reviews from the photography community than pretty well any other book I’ve seen published.  This book is deifnitely worth checking out if you are planning a trip, or even if you want some help pushing your photography to the next level.

I finally got around to finishing “The Hot Shoe Diaries: Big Light from Small Flashes” by Joe McNally and I wanted to share a few of my thoughts about it.

I’ve actually had this book for a long time now and I’ve been reading it gradually, one or two sections at a time. My life has been crazy busy and I simply didnt’ have enough time to sit down and read it straight through. But I wanted to (it’s that good)!

It’s not exactly a continuation of his first book, “The Moment It Clicks: Photography secrets from one of the world’s top shooters“, but it’s written in a very similar style. If you liked the first one you will definitely like this one as well.

The Moment it Clicks was more about the backstory behind each image while The Hot Shoe Diaries is about the thought process involved in creating each image. Where Moment present a single image on each two-page spread and included some descriptive text about the people involved or the location used, Hot Shoe is broken down into short chapters about different lighting techniques. Each technique is presented over 2-3 pages and usually uses 2-3 images showing how the scene looked before and after the lighting was completed. Sometimes there are a couple of different images from each shoot instead. For almost every technique McNally includes a lighting diagram (typically a rough sketch on a used napkin, see the Napkin Notebook) showing where each light and modifier were positioned relative to the subject and the photographer. This is essential information for anyone that really wants to understand how the image was created.

On the surface this book is a technical manual by a Nikon shooter using Nikon Speedlites. But it’s really so much more than that. It really is an attempt to show some of the thought processes required to make some of the iconic images that Joe has produced over the years. It’s about thinking through the requirements of the image rather than simply about the gear involved, and that makes it extremely powerful. Because thinking can be used over and over again no matter what gear is used.

The fact is that the Canon and Nikon lighting systems both have very similar capabilities. Some of the gear from the smaller manufacturers does too. As long as you can understand what techniques are involved, it really doesn’t matter what gear you have. It is a relatively trivial thing to translate “Speedlight with i-TTL and CLS” (Nikon) to “Speedlite and e-TTL” (Canon). And you can always use your old Vivitar flashes in manual mode to accomplish the same effect (maybe it won’t be quite so easy, but it works). You can head over to Lighting 101 by the Strobist to learn more about that.

Joe’s witty and slightly self-deprecating writing style is extremely easy to read (check out his blog if you don’t already read it), and he has this way of spinning some of the most amazing tidbits of life knowledge together into a web with his intended subject. It’s very easy to get lost in what you’re reading and to only truly coem to understand what you learned upon later reflection. Sometimes the best parts of this book aren’t even anything photographic; there are lots of life lessons and tidbits on how to work with people buried amongst Joe’s inner thoughts on how the world works.

I really loved The Moment it Clicks and I was very happy to discover that The Hot Shoe Diaries lived up to that promise. I highly recommend this book for anyone that wants to quickly make their photography better.

Let me start off by making it clear this this is a mini-review of the Mobile Action i-gotU GT-200 specifically for use by photographers.   There are many other uses for the device, but my review specifically relates to using it for geotagging images with the GPS coordinates for the location in which the image was made.

I say mini review because I didn’t subject it to rigorous tests or comparisons.  I didn’t beat it up, flush it down the toilet, or drive over it with my truck.  Rather, I simply used it.  I’ve had it for about 6 weeks and in that time I’ve made almost 3000 images (yes, that’s three thousand); I’ve used it every day while driving to work; I took it on a relaxing vacation at a cottage; I took it with me on a 3 day canoe trip into Algonquin Provincial Park in northern Ontario; and I took it to Banff National Park for a weekend of camping and photowalking.

Note that the real purpose of this device is to track the route that you take.  The bundled software then has the ability to display that route on a map, and it will also allow you to import photos to link from the map.  It really wasn’t designed as a device to embed GPS coordinates into the metadata of a photo; however, by combining the hardware with some after-market software it provides everything required to do so.  It is also relatively cheap (less than $100 vs. upwards of $200 for most photography specific GPS devices) and I had seen a positive recommendation of it for this purpose, so I went ahead and bought one.

There may be better gadgets out there to do the job, but this is the one that I have and I wanted to talk about a few of its good points and also about a few areas where it needs some improvement.  But first I’m going to talk a little bit about the options available to get started with geotagging  (feel free to jump straight to the review if you already know all about these devices).

Hardware Only Options: Canon vs. Nikon

This is one of those areas where Nikon has it right and Canon has it all wrong.  Users of most of the newer Nikon DSLR models have their choice of a couple of simple GPS device that plugs directly into the camera, which then automagically embeds the GPS location directly into the metadata for the photo.  A quick search on Amazon.com reveals several devices that will do the job from $120 (the Geometr) up to $200 (the Nikon GP-1). These gadgets work with the D90, D200, D300, D700, D3, D3X, and even the older D2Hs, D2X, and D2Xs models.  Plug it into the camera and you’re done.  Start taking pictures and every image will be tagged with the location.

UPDATE – if you’re a Nikon shooter then go over and see Matt Ballard’s article Geotagging Photos & Nikon DSLR GPS Options…

Canon on the other hand only provides the ability to directly tag images after you buy the add on wireless transmitter specific to your camera model.  The Canon WFT-E2A for the Canon 1D Mark III lists for $675 at Amazon.com, while the Canon WFT-E3A that works with my Canon 40D goes for about $700.  Similar hardware is available for the 20D, 30D, 50D, 5D, 5D Mark II, and all the professional grade 1D cameras.

But you’re not done there!!!  After buying the transmitter you must still purchase a GPS device to plug into the transmitter, and these are priced similarily to the devices made for the Nikons (in fact many of the after-market options will work with either Canon or Nikon if you have the correct adapter plug).  So Canon owners are looking at an initial outlay of $700-$800 just to get started if they want to go with the hardware only option.  Ouch.

Hardware + Software Options

If you don’t have a compatible Nikon DSLR, or if you simply can’t afford (or won’t pay) the price to get into the Canon hardware, then you have to go old-school and use software to do your geotagging in the computer after capture.  Software has been available to do so for several years, but it’s really only been in widespread use for the last year or so.  And you aren’t limited to Canon or Nikon, and for that matter this works with almost any image file.

If you use the right software then you don’t even actually need to purchase a GPS data logging device; you can skip straight into the software and add the GPS cooredinates for known locations manually. This can be pretty time consuming, but if you are a Lightroom user than you should check out Jeffrey Friedl’s Geoencoding plugin for Lightroom.  It is a very poweral option that works with or without a GPS data logging device.  You can enter the GPS data manually, or you can even pull it directly from a map location using Google Earth.

But if you do have a GPS device, then it all gets even easier.  I have already been using Breeze Downloader Pro to pull all the images off my flash cards and ingest them into my custom folder hierarchy.  This program has way too many features to even begin to talk about them all here (maybe the subject for another review), but one of them is Automatic geotagging of images as they are downloaded, by reading GPS data from a device such as the and storing latitude and longitude positional information in the shooting data of the image.  It works by reading directly from some GPS devices, or from a GPX tracklog that you can export from other devices.  This is very cool software that just works.  And it works very well if the data you are feeding it is any good.

An alternative is Microsoft’s Pro Photo Tools.  I understand that it also has a very rich feature set, but I’ve never used it so I can’t comment about it directly.

i-GotU GT-200

So new we finally get to the review.  Note that while I’m specifically talking about the GT-200, from everything I’ve read the GT-100 and GT-120 are essentially the same from a photography perspective; they have some different features and capabilities, but for geotagging they are pretty much equivalent.

Some things that need to be improved on the GT-200:

1. There’s no tactile onoff switch.  There is one button on the face of the device that you hold down to turn it on, and then hold it down again to turn it off.  It’s easy to turn on and off accidentally, and there’s no way to tell what position the switch is in.  In fact I have carried it around for entire days thinking that it was recording my every step, only to find out later that there was no data for the entire day.
2. There’s no screen or indicator light constantly shows you whether the device is on or off. There are two lights, on red and one blue, underneath a piece of semi-opaque white plastic that occasionally flash when the device is on.  Depending on the pattern of the flashes you are supposed to be able to determine the status.  Unfortunately the lights are almost impossible to see in bright sunlight and it’s not always obvious what the lights are trying to say.  I’ve stared at it for up to a minute before and still didn’t know for sure what the device was doing.
3. It really needs a fixed anchor point to easily attach it to a pack or a camera strap.  It is marketed as a gadget for the active user, and as such it includes a silicone sleeve that both protects it from damage and that has a belt loop to attach it the ourside of your bag, your belt, or a camera strap.  Unfortunately the silicon is very soft and it’s extremely easy to pull the device right out of the sleeve.  I had it attached the outside of my pack for an entire canoe trip and almost lost it twice.  A D ring or something similar firmly attached to the chassis of the device (like the attachment point for a camera strap) would be much better.
4. The included software really sucks.  It is buggy and crashes all the time.  I had to download several different versions from the website before I found one that worked at all on my computer, and even then I had to find an elaborate hack to enable the USB driver on the 64-bit version of Windows Vista.  I’m not going to post a link, rather I’m going to suggest that if you are running 64-bit Vista, stop right now and go find a better device.  I hear the Sony GPS-CS1 is nice.
5. The device does not mount as a drive in Windows (I’m not sure about on a Mac, but I doubt it).  If it did then I wouldn’t even need to use the software.  I only use the software because I need to export a GPX tracklog that can be accessed by Downloader Pro or by the Geoencoding Plugin for Lightroom.  This omission would actually be a deal breaker for me if I were buying a new GPS data logger today.  While reading an article about the GT-200 prior to buying it I mistakenly interpreted the article to say that it could be accessed directly.  I was extremely dissapointed to discover that it doesn’t work that way.
6. While the device is reasonably accurate while you are moving, it goes haywire when you stop.  In fact I would even say it is very accurate while you are moving as it typically resolves my location within a few feet (as compared to Google Maps).  But as soon as you stop, it seems to think that it is still moving and it jumps all over the place.  When I look at my tracklogs for locations where I put my bag down and left it there for any period of time, the location shifts all over the place and it often shows a random path that jumps by as much as 100 meters from where the device sat.  It really doesn’t matter all that much from a geotagging perspective, but it is very odd and something that should be pretty easy to fix.
7. UPDATE – I forgot this one when I originally wrote the article, but it really annoys me!  The included cable to connect the gadget to the computer has a standard USB plug on the computer end, but a ridiculous proprietary plug on the other end.  So instead of being able to use one of about a dozen standard USB cables that ALL of my other gadgets use, I have to have the exact cable that came with this device.  And if I lose it?  It just escapes me how anyone thought this was a good idea…

The things I like about the GT-200:

1. It is very small and lightweight.
2. It is more than accurate for my needs, most of the time.  See #6 above for the rest of the story.
3. The battery life is very good.  Of course I have turned the scanning rate down so that it only records every 30 seconds, but that gives me more than 3 days of battery life.  If you need more resolution then the battery life will get proportionally worse.
4. It’s easy to use and it works.

As you can see, my list of likes is quite a bit shorter than my list of desired improvements.  Unfortunately the things I like about it are basic requirements for me, and I assume that any other similar device will also be good enough.

The Final Word

While the i-GotU GT-200 GPS data logger does what it says it will do, and it does it well enough, I want a better, more reliable device.  The fact that this device does not mount as a drive to allow direct access to the logged data would be a deal breaker for me if I were looking for a new device.  The fact that there is no tactile on/off switch, and that there is no immediate and obvious way to determine the status of the device is equally annoying for me.

I would not recommend this device as a data logger for anyone that is serious about embedding their GPS location into the metadata of all of their photos.   It would be fine for occasional use, or for somebody who simply wants a pretty map showing where they’ve been.  But there are lots of other gadgets out there that do that pretty well too.